Perks of Being a Narcissist

I told someone the other day I was a narcissist and I didn’t really like their reaction. Well okay, maybe narcissist is the wrong word to use here; I only meant that I love myself. I’m not obsessed with myself to the point where I’m going to accidentally drown because I saw my reflection in a pond and just had to kiss it (sorry Narcissus).

But I do love myself, and I get a lot of hate for it. I Googled “word for someone who loves themselves” and ALL the hits that came up said “narcissist”. On one of those Yahoo answer pages, the results I found were: “AN EGOTISTICAL SON OF A BITCH!”, “a self-obsessed weirdo lol” and “I don’t care what you call them, just so long as you’re not like that!”.

Huh.

So let’s look at this for a second here. If I love the person I am, it means I’m a bad person, right? Okay, but why? I’m not saying I’m perfect; there’s some room for improvement in all of us. But I like who I am 100%. And suddenly, that makes me the bad guy.

That’s really fucked up.

So again, just so I have everything clear, it’s not okay to have high self-esteem anymore? It’s not okay to be confident anymore? Yet these are both qualities people should have.

And if someone has low self-esteem, we automatically tell them to have more confidence and to think more highly of themselves.

Okay there Society, you’re really fucking with my head.

Let’s look at this another way: if a girl says “I’m not pretty”, people will either roll their eyes and look at her and tell her she’s fishing for attention or they will tell her yes, she’s pretty and she needs to shut up and realize it. If another girl says, “I’m really pretty”, people laugh at her narcissism and tell her to shut up and act more humble.

So are we all supposed to only like ourselves very privately? Hell no, if I’m proud of something I did or the way I look on a certain day, I want people to know. It’s the reason we take selfies and post about donating blood. We all LOVE ourselves when we do things like that, but God forbid anyone actually admits it out loud. Then they’d be a “narcissist”.

Last year, I was in a really bad place. I hated myself, everything about myself. I hated the way I looked, I hated the way I thought, I hated the way I acted. I hated everything about myself, and I cannot emphasize enough how terrible that felt. So last January, one year ago almost to the day, I decided I was going to work on self-love. And I did it, and I tell you I have never been happier in my life. If that makes me a narcissist, fine. But it also makes me appreciate life more than I ever did before.